Death Among the Sunbathers by E.R. Punshon Read Free Book Online

watchful in her manner. Her answers were briefer, too, and she was more apt to plead ignorance. She repeated emphatically, however, when Mitchell returned to the point, that her sister had had no enemies. It was absurd to suppose anyone could have wanted to murder her. It was all some dreadful mistake. As for suicide, that was quite unthinkable – on the very threshold of a career that promised to be brilliant? Whatever the explanation, it was not suicide, of that Sybil was sure.
    â€˜She would have known it would have killed mother,’ Sybil added.
    â€˜And you can’t suggest who the man could be I described to you who was seen to stop her car and apparently engage in some dispute with her,’ persisted Mitchell.
    â€˜I can’t even think of any little man she knew,’ Sybil answered.
    â€˜I don’t think I said little exactly,’ Mitchell remarked.
    â€˜I thought you said it was a little man?’
    â€˜Description,’ said Ferris, reading it from his note-book, ‘dark, medium height, good-looking – not much to go on.’
    â€˜Well, I can’t think of anyone she knew like that. Or anyone I know, either,’ Sybil declared with a certain decision and at the same time with a certain air of relief.
    There came a knock at the door, and one of the waiting journalists put his head in.
    â€˜Oh, Miss Frankland,’ he said, ‘there’s a chap here who says his name is Keene, says you know him and he must see you. I told him I would let you know he was here.’

CHAPTER FIVE
‘Bobs-the-Boy’ Appears
    That Sybil welcomed this interruption as a relief from questioning she was beginning to feel a strain, was evident enough. She fairly ran from the room, with but the merest muttered word of excuse thrown to the two detectives; and the journalist, torn for a brief moment between using this opportunity to try to get an informing word or two from Mitchell, and his feeling that the newcomer might be a bringer of fresh news, decided finally to follow her.
    Turning to Ferris, Mitchell said thoughtfully,
    â€˜Notice the name, Ferris? Keene... where does he come in and why was Curtis talking about him?’
    Ferris still had uppermost in his mind his theory of the jealous husband.
    â€˜Looks to me as if this girl knew something,’ he remarked.
    â€˜I should put it this way,’ Mitchell said. ‘There’s something in her mind, but what it is even she herself hardly knows yet, and she’s doing her level best not to know. Interesting to see if this Keene is a tall man.’
    â€˜Tall? Why?’ asked Ferris, slightly bewildered.
    â€˜If you noticed,’ Mitchell explained, ‘she wanted the motor-cyclist seen quarrelling with her sister to be a small man. The description said medium height, and you said medium height, and twice over she turned that into “little”, because she wanted it to be a little man that story referred to, or rather, because she was afraid of his being described as tall.’
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ said Ferris doubtfully. ‘I don’t pretend myself to understand all this new-fangled stuff about people knowing what they don’t know they know. It’s fellows like Owen crowding into the force the way they are doing now that hand out that sort of dope.’
    In spite of his respect for his official chief he could not altogether repress the reproach that burned in his voice, for Ferris was of the old-fashioned type, and had indeed only scraped through the necessary promotion examinations by the special favour of the Assistant Commissioner of the day, who had known his value. Mitchell felt the reproach in his old comrade’s voice, and was not insensible to it, but yet stuck to his own point of view.
    â€˜I’m a great believer in education,’ he said; ‘no really good man was ever yet the worse for it, and then, too, the force has got to keep up with the crooks – you